Dear old Boris Johnson: it's almost as if he has a syndrome that forces him to place classical references in every other sentence. (Though, as a mild sufferer myself, I am not about to judge.) Last week, in an interview, he said:

"In the immortal words of Michael Heseltine, I cannot foresee the circumstances in which I would be called upon to serve [as prime minister].

"If, like Cincinnatus, I were to be called from my plough, then obviously it would be wrong of me not to help out.

"But the truth is I have a massive, massive job, an intellectual, emotional challenge that I am hugely enjoying."

So who's this Cincinnatus guy, then?

Well, Johnson is talking about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, listed in the fasti as consul in 460BC. According to Livy, in 458, when the then consul was besieged by the tribe of the Aequi in the Alban hills south-east of Rome, Cincinnatus was called from his plough. Within 15 days he had assembled an army, been appointed dictator (a temporary title giving emergency power to an individual), defeated the Aequi and returned to his fields. According to Cicero, it was on another occasion later, in 439, that he was called from the plough – but the historical details are here not as important as the moral content. Cincinnatus' role for later Romans was to illustrate the fabled strictness and austerity of their forefathers, and illuminate the ideal of the hardworking, straightforward, straight-talking farmer-soldier.

He is a supremely bad example for Boris to have chosen. The point of Cincinnatus is that he is not a career politician charming his way around the dinner parties of Rome by night and cutting deals with the great and the good by day. He is a practical man with a honest, back-breaking job outside politics who just gets on with the task in hand with minimum fuss. He is not interested in office for its own sake – hence his swift resignation of the dictatorship, a post that carried absolute power (Julius Caesar ended up as dictator, and certainly did not resign).

There is a positive dearth of Cincinnatus types in modern British politics – increasingly so, since so many MPs of the younger generation have started out in think-tanks or as journalists. You get the occasional person who is literally called from the "real world" to take up office (Paul Myners, for example, though one would hardly want to compare him to Cincinnatus). I suppose the fictional figure of Mrs Pritchard (as in the television drama The Amazing Mrs Pritchard) is a true modern Cincinnatus. Called not from the plough, but from a local supermarket, to save the nation. The only consolation is that Cincinnatus, by the time of the late Roman republic, was probably almost as much a fantasy figure as she.